Stuff

A few people have asked me if I know where there is a spreadsheet of the general election results available so they can crunch the numbers and explore results themselves. Until now I’ve been using results scraped off the BBC website, but the British Election Study team have now released a data set of the election results for download here.

Are yes, good point at @Valerie, where are those posters like Amber who predicted the Labour victory and death of the Tories. They seem to have disappeared for a bit…seriously I hope they come back and give us some more insight.

Seeing as the polls were wrong (and wrong for how long?), what method are you using to to measure the autocorrelation constant and what was the standard error you discovered?

I think the model is a reasonable one for something so simple, although I couldn’t say if it was definitely better than a random walk model as quite simply noone seems to have established the standard errors of the parameters. I don’t feel the need to shout it from the rooftops that it’s somehow 100% correct. There are plenty of parts that look questionable (LD and UKIP scores in particular)

I’d be highly suspect of going back and “redoing the polls” with a methodology that gave the right figures to see if their model worked. It might be an interesting exercise to see where the polls and reality diverged but quite simply as a forecasting model it might forecast where VI is going, that isn’t really what the team was hoping to predict!

RICH
“Are yes, good point at @Valerie, where are those posters like Amber who predicted the Labour victory and death of the Tories. They seem to have disappeared for a bit…seriously I hope they come back and give us some more insight”
________

I’m not surprised they have disappeared for a bit for they owe me an absolute fortune in Taxi fares ;-)

RICH
Yes but its the same old thing. In fairness, the polls were so wrong one could certainly be forgiven for expecting a tie, but all this OTT pro Labour stuff which has been totally blown out of the water, was just silly.

Just for the record, I’m as disappointed as anyone about the result. I am, after all, a Labour Party activist.

However it needs to be remembered that some people on the front page gave me a pretty rough ride when I tried to explain ‘swing back’ theory and now they’ve all gone as quiet as mice.

Sometimes swing back occurs gradually (e.g. 1986-7), other times it occurs at the last minute (as in 1992 and 2015).

Also please do not be fooled by the propaganda of the poll-bashers: the polls were right all along, it’s just that 3% of people changed their minds at the last minute. That is not a massive swing.

For those who say the polls were incorrect then please explain how they got last year’s Euro elections right when they used exactly the same methodology?

The fundamental thing is that people behave differently in the sobriety of a general election polling booth to the way they behave when answering a hypothetical voting intention question or registering a protest in a mid-term by-election (as the ex-MP Mark Reckless has found out to his cost).

I don’t know if anyone predicted the death of the Tories. If they didn’t die after 1997, it wasn’t going to happen in or after 2015.

It is also (for much the same reasons) premature to predict the death of the Lab party now. For a start, Lab only lost 26 seats, and had a net gain against the Tories, whereas in 1997 the Tories lost 178 seats – most directly to Lab who won 145 seats.

I was planning on crunching numbers today but the PSU on my PC died. So I went to see Mad Max instead.
Hopefully once I get my machine back I can get some numbers to post here.

I’m mostly interested to see how well the Tories did in the South, especially the South West.
If there’s no coming back for the LibDems there then it’ll be almost impossible for Labour to push the Tories out of power.

“Also please do not be fooled by the propaganda of the poll-bashers: the polls were right all along, it’s just that 3% of people changed their minds at the last minute. That is not a massive swing”
________

Totally agree with you and I also said the same.

However the polls were almost spot on in terms of Scotland because as one of the panel members correctly said on election night…”polls are better at picking up avalanches”

I don’t -but I suppose anyone who intends to visit this regularly in the future will wish to be assured that it is providing polling results which are actually measuring public opinion.

One imagines too that the Press & others who commission & pay for these polls will be asking questions about value for their money.

Finally-as Lord Foulkes indicates on that podcast-politicians may take an interest in the accuracy of the 2015 GE polls if they fell that voting behaviour was unreasonably affected by inaccurate polls.

I don’t think the 2015 figures for the Tories in Scotland are very indicative of what may happen in the future. In Ediinburgh many long standing Torries voted for other Unionist parties to oppose the SNP e.g.a lot of Tories in Edinburgh West told me that would as a one-off tactically vote for the Lib Dems & less logically (in my view) I believe many Tory voters assisted Labour’s only successful candidate in Scotland.

I think they have been wrong ever since they thought they established the pattern of the LibDem deserters, and probably used this for sampling and cleaning the sample. But the latest is probably summer 2014.

I’m still only at Dewsbury (going alphabetically … ) – 153 constituencies, looking at patterns of LibDem breaks. It’s statistically not valid, of course, as I’m making judgements on the basis of past election patterns (e.g. systematic ABT or ABL votes, holding up voting shares in previous elections, etc.).

What I can see is that polls probably couldn’t cope with the huge variety of LibDem voters. While it certainly happened that Labour lost votes to UKIP and gained LiBDem, but in most cases the scale of it suggests straight LibDem UKIP switch (especially in the North), and I haven’t seen any discussion about that.

Hawthorn’s remark (and an article I read) suggests that at the price newspapers likely paid, they got their “value” in terms of sampling or research design – both online and phone.

The electorate change figures make interesting reading from those figures.

For example if you look solely at the most marginal Lab / Con tossups in the Midlands / East-Midlands / East of England / SE / SW / West midlands and Yorks and Humber then the electorate dropped by about 46,000 voters in the top 60 seats, despite record levels of immigration over the past 5 years.

The picture is very patchy – so 2000 less electorate in Morley and Outwood (2015 maj 422), 9000! less in Lincoln (2015 maj 1443) and 7000 (2015 maj 3082) less in Halesowen and Rowley Regis.

Did the new individual voter registration system help the Tories in some of these seats and disproportionately harm Labour?

Overall the electorate is down 100,000 on 2010 but that hides the fact that the electorate in Scotland has increased almost universally, making the reduction in England and Wales much greater – arpund 520k.

Certainly the electorate figures for Scotland are much higher almost across the board.

If there was really no swing back then could someone please explain this:

Consistent double-digit Labour poll leads throughout much of 2012 and early 2013…

… Followed by single- digit Labour poll leads throughout 2014…

… Followed by a neck-and-neck situation for the first few months of 2015…

… Followed by a 6% Tory lead on general election day May 2015…?

– If that little lot is not “swing back” then I don’t know what is.

And do you know what is really maddening? It happens in nearly every parliament with almost the same regularity that people deny it’s going to happen.

Sadly, when the Conservatives fall behind in the polls again next year (and doubtless start losing by-elections) we will have the same bunch of people on here predicting the inevitability of Tory disaster at the next general election.

Individual voter registration would not have effected Scotland as Scotland used a hybrid system which meant that anyone registered to vote in the referendum and who qualified would get a vote in the GE.

The polls were very accurate in Scotland.

In 1992 it was eventually decided that the hangover from non-registration because of poll tax caused Labour to lose could individual voter registration have had the same effect in 2015?

According to Oddschecker, Betfair are offering odds of 5/6 (yes five to six on) for Oona King as next leader of the Labour Party. Now, there’s a curved ball! (don’t know if Labour’s constitution allows a Leader in the House of Lords)

Let’s not forget that Labour’s popular support actually rose since 2010, just not quite as much as the Tories. Still, it’s hardly evidence of a party in terminal decline.

Tory Labour
2010 10,703,754 8,609,527
2015 11,334,920 9,347,326

@Gary O
“Evidence perhaps that at least 1.5 million people were disenfranchised by individual voter registration?”

Or 1.5 million fraudlent registrations no longer got through? Realistically, the truth might be somewhere in between, though to say people were disenfranchised because they couldn’t be bothered to register seems to be stretching things a bit.